Latter Days
by Dazzling
Summary: "They've taken their toll, these latter days"...Dealing with the fallout of the worst that could happen.


author: dazzling  
email: glitter_and_glam@hotmail.com   
disclaimer: the show is jj abrams', the lyrics are over the rhine's   
second person syd pov, stream of conscious, somewhere in the future, alt post season one  
  
** latter days**  
  
_*What a beautiful piece of heartache  
This has all turned out to be  
God knows we've learned the hard way  
All about healthy apathy*  
  
_ ***  
  
She remembers dates. Times. Places. People. Friends. Enemies. Missions. Triumphs. Failures. Her memory has never failed her. Until now.  
  
The memories of him have become black and white and blurry and blank and painful and emotionless, all at the same time. They consist of nothing but stark contrasting monotones anymore, and she can't recall when it became so. Some before she refused to break down whilst standing over his grave, but did so privately in the car on the way home. Some time after she woke up one night and knew he was gone. Sometime in between when the pen stayed stationary and the ink blotches grew bigger whenever she tried to write his name, and when she stopped trying.  
  
***  
  
In the dark she melts deep into the sheets that will never be as warm as his arms and waits for the morning. She's learned to hate the night. It signifies all that she had, but lost. It represents everything she should have said, but didn't. She hates the phrase 'should have' as well, because all the things now have become about what she should have done. She hates a lot of words, or times, or places, because they all lead back to him.  
  
The darkness overpowers her whenever she's alone. She's always alone.  
  
***  
  
In her dreams, she still gets lost in his eyes, the deep, swirling pools of green and gray that captivate, enthrall, entrance her. In her dreams, she sees him again, waiting for her at the places only the two of them knew. In her dreams, she is enclosed in his arms, in the only place she ever truly felt safe. In her dreams, he lives.   
  
Her dreams are a dangerous place to be. Those she has loved...has lost...they end up there. Living, existing, becoming, only as her subconscious tells them to do so.  
  
In her dreams, he lives.  
  
***  
  
His email was disconnected four months ago. She still tries that address, faithfully, day after day, as if eternally hoping that one day he might reply. He never does. She writes him long letters about life and dreaming and the therapeutic qualities of writing letters about life and dreaming. The therapist, provided by her work when it became clear to them that she "wasn't coping" with his death, tells her that it helps. She doesn't write because it helps. She writes because out of all the miracles in the world, she thinks that she deserves just one. But he never replies.  
  
***  
  
The one, dime-sized, fading scar on her arm reminds her of that which he once was. Dependable, caring, trustworthy, true. Lover and friend and confidant and everything. The scar is there because he wasn't, and the scar is the only one, because in the next moment, he was. He was there, and he was saving her, and that was all she needed.  
  
The scar is fading, and the irony is that he is, too. Slowly, reluctantly, against her will, he is leaving her. The one reminder of a time he was not there is departing, and all the memories of the times he was are going with it. She thinks of it as her final punishment: she can have neither him nor memories of the same. The acts she is being punished for are both miniscule and major, laughable and sadly not so, real and imagined. She fell in love, and paid for it with her heart and soul and mind. He fell in love, and paid for it with his life. Selfishly, she's not sure which she considers to be worse.  
  
***  
  
She misses him (in a million ways that she could never express). She misses him (because he became all that she lived for). She misses him (but in her dreams, he lives). She misses him (and her dreams are all she has anymore). She misses him (because she loved him). She misses him.  
  
***  
  
In her dreams, he lives. And until the day when that one last truth she holds dear becomes a lie, her dreams are all she has.  
  
**fin**  
  
inspired by the song "latter days"  
and also my impatience to see season two  
epilogue, preceding story will be coming soon  
please do the feedback thing!  



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